Open Courses done right: Saylor Foundation

There are generally two approaches to course-based "big
OER"
(institutional OER projects, as opposed to resources released by
individual professors or others). The first is the MIT
OpenCourseWare approach (which has been replicated
by universities across the US, and the world). Given that professors are
already developing a set of materials to be used in their face-to-face
teaching, let's grab these and upload to the web. The result is a
curriculum, maybe some PowerPoints, sometimes lecture recordings, some
quiz sheets, etc. From the perspective of self-learners, this is rarely
enough material. Only a fraction of all OCW courses provide lecture
recordings, and even if they do, most of the resources listed in the
syllabus will be unavailable (books that cost \$100s of dollars,
articles that are only available through university libraries).

The other approach is more common for distance universities which tend
to develop much more of the material by themselves, using a more
industrial approach to curriculum development (with teams of subject
experts working with instructional designers, web and media specialists,
etc). Because they have developed more of the material in-house, and for
online presentation, they are able to share more coherent and accessible
packages - OpenUniversity UK is a great
example of this. MIT OCW
Scholar is an attempt at
making a few selected OCW courses into more complete packages, with
additional resources necessary for students to learn. Most of this is
still generated by MIT, but they also link to some outside resources.

Of course, there are also plenty of OER resources which do not take the
shape of "college-level 12-week courses", from projects like
Connexions, an online authoring platform for
educational modules, to Free High School Science
Textbooks in South Africa, and even resources
that we often don't think of as OERs, such as
Wikipedia, and Directory of Open Access
Journals. However, for an independent
self-learner, it can be very difficult to put together a sequence of
learning by picking and choosing from these sites, especially in a
subject that is not familiar.

The one thing common to most of the approaches listed above, is that
they focus on producing and sharing their own materials. In the case of
many institutions, it's a point of pride that "MIT videos", "Yale
videos", etc. are being watched by people around the world. They are
branded products, sharing the "excellence of the institution" with the
wider world. The predictable result is that we might have ten or twenty
"Economics 101" courses, all skeletal and incomplete, all containing the
material from only one institution. It might be much more beneficial to
the world if a Yale professor spent his time improving, and adding to a
course created by an MIT professor, instead of just putting out his own
material - but that might not bring as much attention and publicity.

This dilemma was one of the reasons why we started Peer2Peer
University. Our model is basically based on three
pillars. First, course organizers create course outlines that only link
to resources that are freely (gratis) available on the web. These
resources can be from OpenCourseWare collections, from open access
journals, from Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, newspaper articles,
etc. These course outlines are published on
P2PU.org, and made available under an open license - anyone can access
them, and begin learning by themselves, whether or not a course is
running right then, or not. The second pillar is to create a community
of learners around this course, which goes through the resources
together, discuss the ideas, and support each others' learning. The
final pillar is recognition of learning and accreditation, which we are
still experimenting with in several ways.

I wrote my MA thesis about a
large project for publishing open courses in China, which resulted in
more than 12,000 courses being published by more than 700 universities.
When I talked to groups of Chinese students and professors in the open
education field, they often complained that the quality of these courses
was not high enough, and that students would not be interested in
visiting them. I encouraged them to think of these courses as resource
collections, and curate curricula that were excellent - find a great
video from this course, a great reading from that course, put it all
together. I also suggested making this easier, when I was invited to
give a talk to the Top
Level Courses Resource Portal team, at the Higher Education Press.

By developing, soliciting, and disseminating free online academic
materials in a structured and intuitive format, we will be an
alternative and a complement to mainstream education providers,
especially for students who cannot take advantage of educational
opportunities because they cannot afford them.

They have identified the ten majors with the highest enrolments in the
US:

And for each, they've endeavoured to create a full compliment of
courses. For example, the Economics major lists fourteen courses, seven
in the core program, and seven electives. All but three of these are
complete.

What's unique about these courses is that they are curations of material
freely available on the web, put together in a very well thought-out
structure. For example, the course History of Economic
Ideas consists of five units.
Each unit has a brief introduction, learning objectives, and a list of
carefully selected resources. Here is the first unit:

Unit 1: Ancient Economic Thought

1.1 Political, Economic, and Social Thought in the Near East and
Greece

As you can see, the foundation does not aim to produce all the material
themselves, rather they link to resources from OpenCourseWare, Project
Gutenberg, Wikipedia, and other sources (some of the math courses link
to Khan Academy videos).

I have to include another module from this course, the last one, about
visionary thinkers and economic utopias:

Really exciting stuff - I would have loved to take this course as part
of my undergrad!

These course outlines were designed by hired professors – here is an
ad in The Chronicle of Higher
Education for "College-Level Course Designers for Free Education
Initiative". They are licensed under Creative Commons BY license, and
almost all the material is available as very nice HTML pages (except,
for some reason, for the reading comprehension questions, and model
answers).

There's also school.saylor.org, a Moodle install where you can take the
final exam in each course as a Moodle quiz. I took the final exam in the
course mentioned above, about 50 multiple choice questions. I got 72% -
a C-, but I didn't exactly study for it. Not sure what the intention
with this site is - it isn't advertised anywhere, but is perhaps the
first step in a process of offering more social features, or a pathway
to accreditation.

These course resources would work great for P2PU classes - bringing
together people to go through the material together (I can imagine some
great discussions between people who have been reading about Buddhist
economics, anarcho-syndicalists and the Shakers!)